“Why did you stop taking your meds?” I asked him.

He stared into my eyes. “Because I was done,” he said.

“Done living?” I asked. I felt stupid and afraid.

“Yes,” he had said. “It was just more complicated than I knew.”

I thought about the blood in his cabin, the gunshot wound from my mother. Birdie’s shriek.

Where were you before this?

Jail.

I rolled onto my back on his bed. He knew she was there. He’d known all along. Tell your mother, my dad had said, that I know every goddamn thing she does.

Everything rushed at me at once.

They were going to find my mother dead. They were going to either find my sister or find out about her, and someone was going to be charged with kidnapping her. The house was going to be closed off as a crime scene. I was undoubtedly going to be arrested for some or all of it.

I lay still with panic, my chest heaving, my hands shaking. All I could do was trust what Bear had said. That it would be okay. That he could save me. My mother was dead. I didn’t have anyplace else to go.

TWENTY-SIX: KATERI

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 1

“I need to see Diaz again,” Kateri tells Hurt. “I’d like you to go with me.”

He looks only mildly surprised.

“Find something?” he asks.

“Not yet,” she answers. “But I’m confident I will.”

They drive out in her car, and the sky is cut in half, along the horizon, bright blue and above that a sharp line of heavy gray snow clouds. It’s forty-eight degrees and dropping. The radio warns of freezing rain.

She knows no plans have been made to release the remains or to have them processed in any way. There is still some slim hope of finding more of the body.

In the lobby, the receptionist picks up the phone, and Kateri can’t hear what she’s saying. When she hangs it up, she says, “Dr. Diaz isn’t expecting you. Is there something I can help you with?”

Hurt stands at her side, looking up at the art on the walls. Lithographs that look arty and Eastern, maybe Persian.

“I need to reexamine the bones in the Pearl Jenkins case,” she says.

The receptionist comes out from behind her desk, and Kateri sees that she’s in a well-cut pantsuit, with a white blouse that is open quite a ways, but it doesn’t seem to matter because the woman is thin and fairly flat chested. Kateri shrugs her own shoulders forward, caving her chest in.

“Let me see if I can interrupt her,” the receptionist says.

When Elise Diaz comes out, she’s wearing a white medical coat and has just taken off surgical gloves.

“You didn’t tell me Detective Hurt was here,” she says.

Kateri fights rolling her eyes.

“All Fisher,” Hurt says.

Diaz looks up at him, coy. “You’re not coming?” she asks. She’s about to lead them into the basement.

“No, I’m coming,” he says. “But it’s Fisher’s lead.”